The present disclosure relates generally to communication networks, and more particularly, to a distributed data center access switch.
Data centers often use a small percentage of available CPU, storage, and memory capacity. This results in deployment of more servers than are necessary to perform a specified amount of work. Additional servers increase costs and create a more complex and disparate environment that can be difficult to manage. Many data center managers are turning to virtualization so that resources can be shared across a network.
Virtualization is a technology which allows one computer to do the job of multiple computers by sharing resources of a single computer across multiple systems. Through the use of virtualization, multiple operating systems and applications can run on the same computer at the same time, thereby increasing utilization and flexibility of hardware. Virtualization allows servers to be decoupled from underlying hardware, thus resulting in multiple virtual servers sharing the same physical server hardware. This also allows the virtual server to be moved from one physical server to another physical server while maintaining continuous service availability.
Corresponding reference characters indicate corresponding parts throughout the several views of the drawings.